On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Oliver Bandel wrote:

[ RE: enterprise apps ]

> Well, when reasoning about data-structures, OCaml could provide
> much here.
> But IMHO, this area is absolutely a high-performance field.
> 
> And when you retrieve a lot of data, then every little
> performance lack (which is not worth talking about, the little
> quantity of some thousands of datasets or so) will
> cause long waiting times for the application and the user...

I know a couple of people who work in this field, and from their
experiences the #1 with a bullet delay is the database.  They spend a lot
of time optimizing their queries and table structures (where you put
indexes, etc).  And no time what so ever optimizing their code, because it
just doesn't matter.  If the DB query is going to take 15 minutes, it's
not going to matter much if the code firing off the query takes 1ms or
100ms.  In code, they look for ease of development and maintainance more 
so than performance.

Which is why Java took off *despite* it's earlier (and, to a certain 
extent, continuing) performance problems.  

> So you have to use C/C++ for the next decade there, IMHO. (But I hope
> that there are some niches, where OCaml could be used here too.)

Java is huge, but PowerBuilder (still), VisualBasic, and Perl all have
signifigant market shares.

Brian


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